


What Separates the Wolves from the Dogs

by arby



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 15:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19815388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arby/pseuds/arby
Summary: I couldn't just leave it like that. Spoilers through the end of S3.WIP - read at your own risk!





	1. Chapter 1

For three whole days, Joyce mourned for Hop. She had to be strong, for the kids’ sake, so it was only alone in her room at night that she allowed herself to even feel it, to be angry at the world and the Russians for taking him away from her just when she was finally able to admit that maybe she _did_ like him after all, and to be bitterly sorry that she hadn’t kissed him when she had the chance.The truth was, he had liked her for a while now and she knew it.She saw the way he looked at her.Goddamn Murray Bauman had been right.Not that Hop was a brute - though he could be quite brutal, mostly to people who deserved it - but that she had wondered what he would be like in bed.His hands were just so _large_. And a little bit rough in that way that made her shiver, alone in the dark. Whenever he had touched her - such little of it as there was - was as if she were made of porcelain, fragile and infinitely valuable.She had wondered what it would be like to fuck him, the thoughts came with increasing intrusiveness over the past few weeks.And yet she had always held back, held herself apart, the way she had ever since Lonnie turned out to be such a _total_ asshole - hell, even though it was proven to be totally right, her last minute quest to find out why her magnets kept falling down was also on some level an excuse to stand him up, because what her heart secretly wanted was always last on the list of what she was supposed to do.Something always came up, and recently it had been literally saving the world, but that didn’t make it any less cowardly.

Bob, now; Bob was easy. Bob was _nice_. Bob was utterly harmless and tame as a lap dog. (A loyal and brave and kind one, but nonetheless.) Hop was decidedly neither harmless nor nice. He was a great wolf of a man and it scared her a little. ( _A lot_ , her mind corrected her, and when he was alive - here she found her hand clenched into a fist, stuffed into her mouth, and she choked off a tiny cry around it - that had been a good excuse to shove down any attraction she felt to the very bottom of herself, to let it languish, because if she had gone out with him it could have gone somewhere, and she had no idea where that place would be, which was fucking terrifying.)But she remembered having seen his junk and she blushed hotly even in the dark, and then she touched herself and imagined her hands were his, and when she came she cried a little, and she couldn’t have said whether it was for grief or for release or for sheer rage, or maybe all three.

And the next day she got up and went on pretending she was all right. Held it together for the sake of the kids, like she had been doing for years.


	2. Chapter 2

At first Jim tried to be noble. Staring into her eyes, he thought so hard at her, “Better me than you, babe” that he was surprised she didn’t hear it and snap back something sarcastic that would have betrayed some secret feeling. He could see it in her eyes, that she did give some kind of a damn that he was going to die without ever even kissing her on the goddamn cheek, and his heart broke for her being sad until suddenly with a mighty fury he wanted to live, fuck it all, fuck nobility, fuck saving the world even, if there was any justice in the universe it would allow him to go on one goddamn date with Joyce Byers and maybe get to second base after dinner, and then the world winked out and before he even had time to think “Welp, I’m dead” he found himself in a pitch black room.At first he just assumed he _was_ dead and this was some kind of bullshit purgatory but then he swung his fist out and hit the floor, concrete that was faintly dusty or dirty, some tiny grains ground against his palm.

He shouted “Hey!” into the blackness and heard voices approaching. He had time to wonder if it was the sheer force of his longing to prong Joyce that magically saved his life by teleporting him into an unknown dimension - hell, stranger things had happened over the past few years - before he heard what the voices were saying. Or rather, what they were talking in. Fucking Russian.

“Are you kidding me with this?!” he yelled at the universe at large. “Why the fuck didn’t I learn any Russian from stupid Murray?!”

They were definitely talking about him now, and he could see a light under the door - so he was in a room, and probably locked in. 

“Nyet!” he yelled, which was literally the only Russian he knew. A virtual torrent of incomprehensible Russian followed.

“Goddamn it, I’m an American! AMERICANSKI!” he tried.

Someone laughed out loud. The muttering got more urgent, then faded as they went down a hallway, away from his door. He slammed his hand against the cold concrete floor in frustration.


End file.
